Embrace the change
A whole new year ahead of us and most of us are glad to have put the last year behind us. One thing all of the chaos and uncertainty has taught us is we all have to embrace new ways of doing things. Online shopping went crazy. Curbside pickup – who knew that was even a thing. Grandparents Zoom calling their grandkids (let’s face it, everyone was Zoom calling everyone). Kids everywhere taking up their schoolwork from a desk at home. I personally had to shift from long-time government employee to a solopreneur and brand-new podcast host.
So, I’m going to embrace a bit of change for this blog post too. Normally my blog is a bit of a story wrapped around something valuable about collaboration. Now, I don’t intend to change the overall focus on collaboration, but I think it will be fun to switch up the kinds of content and format I use to write it up. Heck, sometimes it might be a handful of bullet points that have been on my mind, kinda like what Tim Ferriss’ Five-Bullet Friday. Maybe it’ll be about a book or a podcast that has my mind turning. Regardless, I think it’s time to embrace the change.
To follow along on the ‘change’ vein…
Large organizations are fond of their document templates and I’ve always been amazed at how militant people can be when you change their template to suite your needs. Not that long ago, I worked at an organization with a standard template for a project’s terms of reference. As many templates do, this one covered every possible piece of information that may come up for any project. That template made sure that the process was as thorough as could possibly be imagined and it made for excruciatingly detailed documents (I mean when the defined roles table could stretch easily beyond 10 and even 20 pages).
That template, for all the good work it captured and catalogued, had a significant flaw. Nobody read it. A quick look at the scope, the budget, and how many people it needed was pretty much all anyone really took from it.
So, for my project, I changed it. Ok, I added one thing to it. I called it the At-a-Glance summary and my only rule was that it could not be longer than one page. It captured in an easy to ready, tabular format the most succinct important points from the document. And it was a hit. It acted like an executive summary and gave all the critical information on that single page. It meant that more people understood and then support or even advocate for my project .
Now I admit that adding a summary doesn’t necessarily win any awards for creativity, but it was a change to the status quo that, for some, upset their idea about how things should be done. For my project though, it was an experiment and it was a success.
I see collaboration that way too. A large part of any collaboration is the creativity brought to a problem by a group of people. Suggesting new ‘stuff’ and trying it out to see if it works is at the heart of collaboration. And being prepared to embrace changes as they come up makes us all better collaborators and better innovators. Even if it’s just adding a summary.
Here’s to trying ‘new stuff’ and seeing if it works.
Happy Collaborating.
Scott Millar, through Collaboration Dynamics, often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together. As the host of the Cool Collaborations podcast where he explores fun stories and insights of successful collaboration with guests from around the world, and then dives into what made them work. Cool Collaborations is currently available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.
